Structure, Process and Party:

Essays in American Political History

Peter H. Argersinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Print ISBN:
  9780873327985
• Subtopic: Politics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315488837
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging traditional approaches to the study of American political history, the essays in this book establish the significance of the institutional framework of the electoral system and argue the importance of its interaction with political conditions.

1

American Electoral History: Party Systems and Voting Behavior

Theory and Research: Overview

In the past quarter century, the analysis and interpretation of American electoral history have been transformed. The “new political history” responsible for that transformation has itself been part of the larger behavioral revolution in the social sciences, which in the study of history has been characterized by the growing use of social-science and quantitative approaches and methodology (Clubb and Bogue, 1977; Kousser, 1980b; Kammen, 1980; Bogue, 1981a). Developing rapidly since the mid-1960s, the new political history has focused chiefly on electoral behavior, legislative roll-call analysis, and collective biography. Historical patterns in voting have received perhaps the greatest and most fruitful scrutiny (Bogue, 1968, 1980; Bogue et al., 1977; VanderMeer, 1977).

The new political history arose from sources both without and within the historical profession. Although the use of quantitative and social-science methods by political historians goes back nearly a century, their application in recent decades stemmed primarily from the example of and contact with behavioral political scientists. Especially important were the survey-based election and voter studies by P.F. Lazarsfeld and the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research and by A. Campbell and his colleagues at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and the analyses of aggregate data and time series by such historically minded political scientists as V.O. Key, Jr., and W.D. Burnham. Although it remains true that political scientists look more to general models and paradigms and historians to the particularities of time and place, cross-disciplinary exchange and collaboration have proved increasingly profitable in recent decades, especially in the study of parties and voting (Jensen, 1969a, 1969b; Bartley, 1975; Silbey et al., 1978).

Among historians, the encouragement and example of several scholars in the 1950s and 1960s contributed vitally to the development of the new political history and its application to the study of electoral behavior. The work of Benson was pivotal. In an enormously influential 1957 essay (collected with other essays in Benson, 1972), he exposed the weaknesses of traditional political history and called for the careful specification of hypotheses and the use of “systematic” data and methods to study time series and group voting. Benson’s pathbreaking book on Jacksonian politics (1961) employed quantitative methods and social-science concepts to reveal the importance of ethnocultural voting and electoral cycles. Three historians at the University of Iowa in the late 1950s, Aydelotte, Bogue, and Hays, were also instrumental in the development and dissemination of the new political history (see, e.g., Aydelotte, 1971; Bogue, 1968; Hays, 1968).

By the early 1970s, the new political history had direction, momentum, and achievement. Dissertations, articles, and monographs analyzing electoral history proliferated; enough important work had been published to support two significant anthologies (Swierenga, 1970; Silbey and McSeveney, 1972); and there was sufficient interest in quantitative methods to warrant a handbook for analyzing historical data (Dollar and Jensen, 1971). Moreover, in the area of popular voting behavior and political parties, the profusion of studies in the 1960s and 1970s produced what have become the two major analytical constructs of the new political history: the electoral realignment/party systems framework and the ethnocultural model of voting.

The electoral realignment/party systems model was developed primarily by political scientists. Key (1955), Campbell et al. (1960, 1966), Pomper (1967), and MacRae and Meldrum (1960) were especially important in developing a typology of elections that designated as “critical” or “realigning” those elections (or periods) that produced major change in voting behavior and party strength. Burnham (1967, 1970) elaborated the scheme of electoral realignments and subsequent “party systems” and added to it important issue and policy dimensions. Sundquist (1973) and W.L. Shade (1973) also offered analytical syntheses of electoral realignments. Historians did have some part in establishing the presence of voting cycles (Benson, 1961; Sellers, 1965) and in investigating critical elections and periods (Rogin and Shover, 1970; Clubb and Allen, 1971). But the major work in establishing the overall framework was done by political scientists using both mid-twentieth-century survey data and aggregate historical voting data in time series; historians typically borrowed the model and applied it in their studies of specific times and places. Together, the complementary theory and research of political scientists and historians produced a framework of election types (critical or realigning; maintaining; deviating; reinstating; converting) and of party systems (those produced by realignments of the early 1800s, 1820s, 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s). In this model, American political history has been cyclical in nature, with electoral realignments periodically disrupting an existing party system and producing another with its own distinctive patterns of voting and turnout, of party strength and functions, and of salient issues and policy agendas.

The second major analytical construct of the new political history is the ethnocultural interpretation of voting. Where the realignment/party systems model provides a longitudinal framework for the American electoral system(s), the ethnocultural model provides an explanation of individual and group voting in the past; and where the realignment model came chiefly from political scientists, the ethnocultural interpretation came primarily from historians—although here too interdisciplinary influences are clear (e.g., Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Lubell, 1952). Again Hays (1960, 1980) and especially Benson (1961) were central. Rejecting the then-dominant view that class or socioeconomic status had been the principal determinant of American voting, Benson (1961, p. 165) argues “that at least since the 1820’s … ethnic and religious differences have tended to be relatively the most important sources of political differences” (his emphasis). In the next decade (and after) a host of studies employing quantitative and social-science approaches, methods, and theory demonstrated that ethnicity and religion had long been basic to American voting patterns (see Fuchs, 1968; Swierenga, 1971; McSeveney, 1973; Kelley, 1977).

By the 1970s, then, the new political history had developed two complementary frameworks for understanding American electoral history. In place of the “presidential synthesis” for organizing political history (criticized by Cochran, 1948, in an important plea for a new “social science synthesis”) was the realignment/party system model; in place of the “progressive” socioeconomic interpretation of voting associated with Charles A. Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner was the ethnocultural interpretation. Based on impressive quantitative and interdisciplinary theory and research, the two frameworks became the reigning paradigms of political historians and have greatly enlarged the understanding of American political history.

Despite their evident strengths and wide acceptance, however, both the realignment and ethnocultural models have been subjected to substantial criticism for methodological, conceptual, and empirical shortcomings. Methodologically, major works in the ethnocultural synthesis, necessarily based primarily on aggregate and areal analysis to determine group voting behavior, have been faulted for usage of homogeneous unit analysis, reliance on ecological correlation coefficients, and failure to employ adequate multivariate or regression analysis (Kousser, 1976; Lichtman and Langbein, 1978). Conceptually, the ethnocultural model has been criticized for inadequate attention to class and status (Green, 1972; Wright, 1973) and for not clearly, consistently, or convincingly specifying and demonstrating the relationships between ethnic or religious group membership, values, or behavior on the one hand and voting on the other (Wright, 1973; R.L. McCormick, 1974; Bogue et al., 1977). Empirical findings have revealed times and places where class or socioeconomic status seem clearly more important than ethnocultural factors in voting. Nor does the ethnocultural synthesis sufficiently explain change or realignment (Bogue et al., 1977; Lichtman, 1976, 1983); as Bogue (1980, p. 250) notes, “There is surely some logical inconsistency in displaying strong correlations between ethnocultural groups and party during periods of political stability and failing to show that realignment was effected by fundamental shifts in the allegiance of such groups.” Finally, the ethnocultural model has seemed to focus too narrowly on but one aspect of politics, voting, and too little on acquiring and using power or making policy (Green, 1972; R.L. McCormick, 1974).

The realignment/party systems model has encountered equally broad and in some respects even fiercer criticism. Scrutiny of its problems has left the character, causes, and consequences of electoral realignment in doubt and not just the formulation but the very validity of the party systems framework open to serious question (Sternsher, 1975; Lichtman, 1976, 1982, 1983; Bogue et al., 1977; Chubb, 1978; Ladd with Hadley, 1978; Prindle, 1979; Kousser, 1980a; Clubb et al., 1980; R.L. McCormick, 1982). Conceptually, the realignment/party systems model has been criticized for being too narrowly taxonomic and descriptive, i.e., for establishing a complicated classification system without adequate theory or explanation of change and with insufficient attention to the whole political system and to the role of public policy in electoral change. The classification system itself has been faulted for lacking sufficiently precise and well-defined specification of the amount and rate of change needed for “critical” realignment, of the length a “critical period” may extend, and indeed of the very mechanics and nature of realigning change. Methodological problems include identifying and measuring realignments, ascertaining the amount of change produced by mobilization of new voters vs. conversion of old ones, and gauging behavioral (voting) as against deeper attitudinal change in partisan identification. Empirically, the results of the many studies of realignment have tended to be conflicting, confusing, and noncumulative. Substantial local, group, and temporal variations have been found in the extent, rate, and nature of realigning electoral change; surprising continuity has appeared in “realigning” periods, as has variability in “stable” phases; and a complicated and at times contradictory array of periods and phases within party systems has emerged. Twenty-one of the 39 presidential elections from 1824 to 1976 have been labeled “critical” by one study or another (Lichtman, 1982).

Beyond such criticisms and caveats as these, there is even more fundamental objection to the realignment/party systems framework. Chubb (1978) has maintained that the very notion of an ongoing cycle of periodic critical realignments is faulty—that there is no necessary relation between one party system and its successor and that change occurs because of unpredictable exogenous factors rather than internal, periodic, systemic ones. A similar argument (Ladd with Hadley, 1978, p. 376) holds that there is “no realignment cycle, no striking rhythm,” no one pattern or model of electoral change, that realignments result from broad sociopolitical change and consequent change in political agendas. Furthermore, scholars have identified not only “critical” realigning change but also secular electoral change (Key, 1959) and nonperiodic change (Burnham, 1965, 1970) in the electoral system.

Influenced by Burnham’s analysis of the declension of parties in the twentieth century, some political historians have begun to sketch out an alternative periodization of electoral history to the five-party-system division of the realignment model. R.L. McCormick (1979) has termed the nineteenth century the “party period” of American political history, in which parties had electoral and policy roles far greater than in the twentieth century, while Lichtman (1976, p. 347) has suggested that perhaps “a qualitatively different era of electoral politics” marked by the declining importance of parties and partisanship began around the turn of the century (see also Benson et al., 1978, for a related analysis). R.L. McCormick and others (Clubb et al., 1980; Kleppner, 1982a) have linked such major changes in party functions to the social and economic modernization of American life, which transformed the political universe in which party systems developed and functioned and thus divided electoral history into periods fundamentally different from those of the party systems framework.

Such criticism and reconsideration of the realignment/party systems model led R.L. McCormick to declare “realignment theory in disarray” (1982, p. 94) and political history in “crisis” (1979, p. 279) by the late 1970s and another major political historian (Kousser, 1980a, p. 895) to call for a “new synthetic idea” Political scientists, too, have recognized the need to strengthen or reformulate realignment theory and to connect electoral change with policymakers and policymaking (e.g., Campbell and Trilling, 1980). Yet even the recent major work of synthesis and revision by Clubb et al. (1980; considerably foreshadowed by Burnham et al., 1978), refining the conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of electoral change and linking voting behavior to elite behavior and policymaking, does not satisfy the most forceful critics of the realignment/party systems model, who want it supplemented or replaced (R.L. McCormick, 1982; Lichtman, 1982).

Beyond seeking further to improve and refine existing explanations and to employ better research designs and quantitative techniques for aggregate electoral data (Kousser, 1973; McCarthy and Tukey, 1978; Hammond, 1979; Clubb et al., 1980, 1981; VanderMeer, 1981; W.G. Shade, 1981a; Hammarberg, 1983), political historians are embarking in new directions. Two seem especially important: the study of voting-policy linkages and the analysis of voter participation. As noted above, the narrow focus on mass electoral behavior and the failure to investigate the connections between voting and policy have increasingly been recognized as weaknesses of both the ethnocultural and the realignment models (see especially R.L. McCormick, 1974, 1982; Lichtman, 1976, 1982; Kousser, 1980a, 1982). Political historians have gone far in illuminating the social bases of voting but not in specifying the electoral causes and consequences of public policy. In addition to analyzing the role of issues in voting and realignment (Key, 1966; Burnham, 1970; Ginsberg, 1972; Sundquist, 1973; Bennett and Haltom, 1980), political scientists much more than historians have investigated the question of voting-policy linkages (Schattschneider, 1960; Key, 1966; Burnham, 1970; Ginsberg, 1976; Brady, 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. American Electoral History: Party Systems and Voting Behavior
• Chapter 2. Electoral Processes in American Politics
• Chapter 3. The Value of the Vote: Political Representation in the Gilded Age
• Chapter 4. New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age
• Chapter 5. From Party Tickets to Secret Ballots: The Evolution of the Electoral Process in Maryland during the Gilded Age
• Chapter 6. “A Place on the Ballot”: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws
• Chapter 7. Regulating Democracy: Election Laws and Dakota Politics, 1889-1902
• Chapter 8. Populists in Power: Public Policy and Legislative Behavior
• Index
• About the Author